Re: PubScience Coverage

[martin@skmassociates.net]

I'd be delighted if David or someone else will tell me that I am wrong,
but it appears to me that SciRus simply provides indexing for commercial
journals or data bases owned by Elsevier (or a subsidiary), plus indexing
for whatever is out there available without charge.

That product is fine, as far as it goes.  One has to wonder, though, how
many users are unaware of how much other information (Elsevier's
commercial competitors) is not included in this indexing, and therefore
how limiting SciRus actually might be.

My own experience in searching SciRus is that they also index papers which
appear in their journals, but they make no reference to the fact that some
of these papers may be freely available on an insititutional or personal
web site.  Rather, SciRus suggests that to get the full text of the
article, one must pay something in the vicinity of $30 per article.  
PubSCIENCE pointed to the web site in many of these cases.

Please let me know about other experiences.

Sue Martin

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002 17:56:45 -0800 (PST), Ann Okerson wrote:

> Given the discussion on various e-lists about the closure of PubScience,
> I'm forarding with permission this message from David Goodman, who
> serves as an advisor to Scirus.  He describes its coverage.
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 16:08:52 -0500 (EST)
> From: David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
> To: Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>
> Subject: Re: Scirus
> 
> According to my experimentation and their help pages, Scirus certainly
> does search non-ScienceDirect content. It seems to work as follows:
> 
> 1. There are two choices, search the web, or search journals (or search
> both together)
> 
> 2. If you choose to search journals, the
> default is to search all of the following:
>   Beilstein on ChemWeb
>   BioMedCentral
>   Ideal
>   ScienceDirect
>   Medline on BioMedNet
> 
> You can choose any specific one or more of the group.
> BioMedCentral is not an Elsevier product,
> and the Medline version used includes all the journals on Medline.
> 
> 3. If you choose the web, the default is to search
>   Chemistry Preprint Server
>   CogPrints
>   E-print ArXiv
>   Mathematics Preprint Server
>   NASA
>   Neuroscion
>   US Patent Office
> 
> AND
> 	university Web sites
> 	society homepages
> 	scientists' homepages
> 	news pages
> 	conference information
> 	patent information
> 	e-prints/preprints
> 	company homepages
> 	product information
> 
> but you can choose to search any or all of them.
> 
> 4. In my experience, the journal search works fairly well, and the web
> search also works fairly well, if you use only the defined sources. It
> is reasonably usable on the undefined web if you choose purely technical
> terms and are quite specific. It is a particularly good search engine
> for scientist home pages.
> 
> 5. The default display is by relevance. Among journal sources, Elsevier
> banners seem to appear often, perhaps because Scirus uses the BioMedNet
> banner for Medline but non ScienceDirect sources. You can eliminate the
> ScienceDirect sources in the advanced search mode, by using the ANDNOT
> operator with "science-direct" in the url field.  (You will still get
> some Elsevier titles, for early years that are not yet on 
> ScienceDirect).
> 
> Note that I am a member of their library advisory board, but am 
> answering just as an individual, with information based only on the 
> actual site. It is a free site, and everyone can try it themselves: 
> www.scirus.com
> 
> Dr. David Goodman
> Princeton University Library
> and
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> dgoodman@princeton.edu